On Monday 15 December 2008 09:09:29 Adam Davison wrote:
> At the moment we have hard dependencies in scons. My initial thought
> is that we deliberately do this so that we can fix sensible default
> sets of features and encourage distributions to stick to that. But I'd
> be interested to hear what other people feel about this.
>
> Adam

Hello all
I'm all against hard dependencies, from a distro point of view.
Imagine that to assure adoption of mixxx in all distributions + windows + OSX, 
you will need to say that all systems should have your stated versions of the 
package.This will noever happens and will lead to a two more serious issues:

- The bad: Packager will pick mixxx, patching all necessary things to work 
with his available deps versions, or even shutdown all static link and made it 
shared links, since this sometimes have secutiry reasons. What will happens is 
that we will never can be assure of the bug reports and even the packager 
maybe doesn't have complete understand of the issues his changes can affect 
mixxx itself.
Cases like this i did myself lots of time in my years of distro working

- The worst: Distro will not ship package at all. And of course, as we are 
open source and is all about freedom, this always lead to some non official 
package made from someone that want mixxx for their distro, but is not direct 
related for the distro work. And even doing for personal use, sometimes this 
packages fall in the public and more people will be using.
Result is we will have a package not sanctioned for the distro standards and 
even made in a way that we can't identify bug reports.

The only way that we can prevent this scenarios would be using old method of 
add all depends sources inside mixxx source download, and believe me, this is 
not pretty. 
Anyway, today we already have a mix of soft/hard depends, since we never check 
which version of qt 4 are we using, it tests only for qt4 itself. 

So my 2c is do that:
Soft dependencies, but with minimal test range, like, we know that libfoo 
works from version >= 0.9, then we force the test to do exactly that. If a new 
incompatible version appears, distro will report quickly and we can receive 
quick status. If distro have an older version, than packager will be ready to 
pick any version after 0.9 that suits better their system.

-- 
Helio Chissini de Castro
KDE Project
Brasil and South America Primary Contact

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